Caitlyn Murray has never let on that she's had fantasies about her brother's friend Eli Anderson for years. She'd do anything for the sexy baseball player who walked away from stardom to stay in Sapphire Falls and take care of his family. But she and Eli are friends. Just friends.

So when her brother hatches a plan to get Eli to the pro baseball try-out for the Kilby Catfish and another chance at his dream, Caitlyn is all in. After all, what's a little kidnapping among friends?

A spot on the pitcher's mound for the Catfish isn't the only tempting thing about the spontaneous road trip. Eli already knows that Caitlyn is as sweet as the candies she makes for the Sapphire Falls bakery, but alone with her overnight in the tiny motel room in Kansas, it's impossible to resist the urge to take a little taste.

But when that taste leads to falling for the girl next door just as his front door is moving hundreds of miles away, can Eli really have it all? Or do they have too many strikes against them?

Caitlyn took her third shot. The look on her face as she swallowed the liqueur was adorable.

“How many more shots do you need?” she asked.

He frowned. “What?”

“Well, it took two to get you to kiss me. You just had your third. I’m wondering how many you need to take me to bed.”

He just stared at her. He blinked. He was pretty much raring to go right now, actually. “How many do you need?”

She gave him a smile that wasn’t a bit tipsy. And was fully seductive. “I didn’t need even one, Eli.”

It was like his cock was voice-activated. All she’d done was talk and he was rock hard. “Damn, Cait.”

“You can’t be completely surprised.”

Was he surprised? That she was attracted to him? That she wanted to sleep with him?

Yeah, he fucking was. Because if his mind had ever even started to go in that direction, he would have shut it down.

“I don’t need anything to want you,” he said honestly. “I’m going to need a few more to get me past that.”

She took a long draw on her beer. After she swallowed, she nodded. “Okay, well, I’m going to need two more to get to drunk-enough-to-fall-asleep-even-knowing-you’re-half-naked-in-the-next-bed and drunk-enough-to-not-even-get-up-in-the-night-for-the-bathroom.”

Ah yes, the bathroom last night. As if that had been far from his mind all day.

“Two more it is,” he agreed, even as his body screamed at him to shut the hell up.

If he kissed her again, if he kept going … well, from the look on Caitlyn’s face, they both knew where that was going to lead them.

She ate a fry and took a drink of beer, then licked her lips clean of the salt.

An image of her on her knees, those lips and that tongue wetting some other things, flashed through his mind. He coughed and shook his head.

Then she raised her hand to the waitress again. She held up two fingers and waved them between her and Eli.

The girl brought four more shots over and set them in the middle of the table.

Caitlyn picked one up. “Okay, moment of truth. We drink these shots and we go to the hotel, to two separate beds, and home to Sapphire Falls tomorrow as friends. Or we don’t take these shots and we go back to the hotel to one bed. And then go home to Sapphire Falls tomorrow as friends.”

Jennifer Bernard is a graduate of Harvard and a former news promo producer. The child of academics, she confounded her family by preferring romance novels to … well, any other books. She left big city life for true love in Alaska, where she now lives with her husband and stepdaughters. She’s no stranger to book success, as she also writes erotic novellas under a naughty secret name not to be mentioned at family gatherings.

Erin Nicholas is the author of sexy contemporary romances. Her stories have been described as toe-curling, enchanting, steamy and fun. She loves to write about reluctant heroes, imperfect heroines and happily ever afters. She lives in the Midwest with her husband who only wants to read the sex scenes in her books, her kids who will never read the sex scenes in her books, and family and friends who say they’re shocked by the sex scenes in her books (yeah, right!).